text: The name FOAM has been claimed to appear for the first time as a post-processing tool written by Charlie Hill, in the early 90s in Prof. David Gosman's group in Imperial College London. As a counter argument , it has been claimed that Henry Weller created the FOAM library for field operation and manipulation which interfaced to the GUISE (Graphical User Interface Software Environment) which was created by Charlie Hill for interfacing to AVS.
  As a continuum mechanics / computational fluid dynamics tool, the first development of FOAM (which became OpenFOAM later on) was virtually always presumed to be initiated by Henry Weller at the same institute by using the C++ programming language rather than the de facto standard programming language FORTRAN of the time to develop a powerful and flexible general simulation platform. From this initiation to the founding of a company called Nabla Ltd, (predominantly) Henry Weller and Hrvoje Jasak carried out the basic development of the software for almost a decade.
  For a few years, FOAM was sold as a commercial code by Nabla Ltd.,
  on 10 December 2004, it was released under GPL and renamed to OpenFOAM.
  In 2004, Nabla Ltd was folded. Immediately afterwards, Henry Weller, Chris Greenshields and Mattijs Janssens founded OpenCFD Ltd to develop and release OpenFOAM. At the same time, Hrvoje Jasak founded the consulting company Wikki Ltd and maintained a fork of OpenFOAM called openfoam-extend, later renamed to [https://sourceforge.net/projects/foam-extend/ foam-extend].
  In April 2008, the OpenFOAM development moved to using git for its source code repository.
  On 5 August 2011, OpenCFD transferred the OpenFOAM software (source code) and documentation from OpenCFD to the newly incorporated OpenFOAM Foundation, registered in Delaware State, USA.
  On 8 August 2011, OpenCFD was acquired by Silicon Graphics International (SGI). On 12 September 2012, ESI Group announced the acquisition of OpenCFD Ltd, becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary of ESI Group, and OpenCFD retaining its ownership of the OpenFOAM trademark.
  On 25 April 2014, The OpenFOAM Foundation Ltd was incorporated in England, as a company limited by guarantee with all assets transferred to the UK and the US entity dissolved, together with changes to the governance of the Foundation. Weller and Greenshields left OpenCFD and formed CFD Direct Ltd in March 2015.
  The OpenFOAM Foundation Ltd directors are Henry Weller, Chris Greenshields, and Cristel de Rouvray.
  The following are the three main variants of OpenFOAM:
  # OpenFOAM, Foundation, developed and maintained primarily by CFD Direct Ltd with a sequence based identifier (e.g. 6.0) (from 2011).
  # OpenFOAM, OpenCFD, developed and maintained mainly by OpenCFD Ltd, (ESI Group company since 2012) with a date-of-release identifier (e.g. v1606) (from 2016).
  # The FOAM-Extend Project, mainly maintained by Wikki Ltd. (from 2009).